I was wondering how much difference if any hard drive speed makes to seti? When I ran the benchmark test for Luke, my hard drive barely even had a bar in the comparisons and Windows 7 also says it is my slowest componant. What should I look for in a Hard drive as I don't need a huge one maybe I can get a good one if it matters.

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

I was wondering how much difference if any hard drive speed makes to seti? When I ran the benchmark test for Luke, my hard drive barely even had a bar in the comparisons and Windows 7 also says it is my slowest componant. What should I look for in a Hard drive as I don't need a huge one maybe I can get a good one if it matters.

What is your Windows Experience Base score in Win 7? That's what matters. It lists your HDD performance against your other system components in Real Time tests. For S@H it shouldn't matter.

In Vista, my system has 5.9 for all components but I understand that Win 7 goes to 7.9. Maybe you could post your numbers.

The WD Raptors/VelociRaptors are about the fastest SATA HDDs out there for a 10,000 rpm drive.

Does hard drive speed effect seti?

In short, no. (AFAIK)


If you have a ATA100 you should be well.
IIRC, this HDD I should have in my QX6700 system.

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I was wondering how much difference if any hard drive speed makes to seti? When I ran the benchmark test for Luke, my hard drive barely even had a bar in the comparisons and Windows 7 also says it is my slowest componant. What should I look for in a Hard drive as I don't need a huge one maybe I can get a good one if it matters.

Doing the CUDA tasks your drive will probably get more exercise then mine do, but I've set "Tasks checkpoint to disk at most every" to 900 seconds. I found this lower the temps of my drive a few degrees. I had messed around with longer times, but didn't find any noticeable gain. The saving data to disk every x number of seconds is really the only activity that goes on while processing a task. The downloading & uploading of task data is limited by the connection to the servers. Which is many times slower then any current hard disk(at least I hope so).

If you want the highest performance then you could grab some ramdisk software. I personally like Datarams free version.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

I was wondering how much difference if any hard drive speed makes to seti? When I ran the benchmark test for Luke, my hard drive barely even had a bar in the comparisons and Windows 7 also says it is my slowest componant. What should I look for in a Hard drive as I don't need a huge one maybe I can get a good one if it matters.

What is your Windows Experience Base score in Win 7? That's what matters. It lists your HDD performance against your other system components in Real Time tests. For S@H it shouldn't matter.

In Vista, my system has 5.9 for all components but I understand that Win 7 goes to 7.9. Maybe you could post your numbers.

The WD Raptors/VelociRaptors are about the fastest SATA HDDs out there for a 10,000 rpm drive.

Processor 7.1 Reran 7.5
Memory 5.9 Reran 5.9
Graphic 6.9 Reran 7.2
Gaming Graphics 6.9Reran7.2
Hard Disk 5.2 Reran5.2
Out of a possible 7.9
I think the memory went down a bit when I set my overclock.

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

I see I have an option for "ReadyBoost" to speed up my system using my USB flash. Anyone know what that is all about?

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

I see I have an option for "ReadyBoost" to speed up my system using my USB flash. Anyone know what that is all about?

It's an idea someone had. I like this bit of data that someone got from testing with it.

"A system with 512 MB of RAM (the bare minimum for Windows Vista) can see significant gains from ReadyBoost. In one test case, ReadyBoost sped up an operation from 11.7 seconds to 2 seconds. However simply increasing physical memory from 512 MB to 1 GB reduced it to 0.8 seconds."

It might be more useful in note/netbooks, but if you have more then the minimum amount of ram in a desktop I'm not sure you would get any gain out of it.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

I see I have an option for "ReadyBoost" to speed up my system using my USB flash. Anyone know what that is all about?

It's an idea someone had. I like this bit of data that someone got from testing with it.

"A system with 512 MB of RAM (the bare minimum for Windows Vista) can see significant gains from ReadyBoost. In one test case, ReadyBoost sped up an operation from 11.7 seconds to 2 seconds. However simply increasing physical memory from 512 MB to 1 GB reduced it to 0.8 seconds."

It might be more useful in note/netbooks, but if you have more then the minimum amount of ram in a desktop I'm not sure you would get any gain out of it.

Thats kind of what I got out of it also...

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

I was wondering how much difference if any hard drive speed makes to seti? When I ran the benchmark test for Luke, my hard drive barely even had a bar in the comparisons and Windows 7 also says it is my slowest componant. What should I look for in a Hard drive as I don't need a huge one maybe I can get a good one if it matters.

Doing the CUDA tasks your drive will probably get more exercise then mine do, but I've set "Tasks checkpoint to disk at most every" to 900 seconds. I found this lower the temps of my drive a few degrees. I had messed around with longer times, but didn't find any noticeable gain. The saving data to disk every x number of seconds is really the only activity that goes on while processing a task. The downloading & uploading of task data is limited by the connection to the servers. Which is many times slower then any current hard disk(at least I hope so).

If you want the highest performance then you could grab some ramdisk software. I personally like Datarams free version.

For a desktop setting that checkpoint time to just short of the time for your drives to go to sleep will result in the best performance possible. However I doubt you could measure the difference in less than 10 continuos years of crunching and then it would be a change of 0.0001 in RAC.

Unless you are planning on editing hidef video don't worry about your hard drive speed.

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Thanks Gary, I didn't even know it was slow until I did the tests. LOL Everything is working great so then I guess I won't have to hassle with reloading windows. Cool.

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

I haven't read all posts but i can say that has absolute minimum effect.

When s@h and boinc decides to write a file it talks to the O/S and returns almost immediately.

I run my 8 GPU cruncher with a 40GB old ATA Seagate harddrive and it cope just perfectly.

The O/S caches the writes so the O/S writes when it has time otherwise it stays in memory until it can write.. The important thing here is instead enough ram so the O/S can cache the writes.

Kind regards Vyper

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_________________________________________________________________________
Addicted to SETI crunching!
Founder of GPU Users Group

The O/S caches the writes so the O/S writes when it has time otherwise it stays in memory until it can write..
Kind regards Vyper

And if your system locks up / crashes before the write to the HDD, then that data is lost.

Thanks to everyone, I wasn't sure but now feel I am OK with this drive. It's an older WD raptor.

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

And you know the connection transfer rate?

ATA100/133 - SATA150/300 ?

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And you know the connection transfer rate?

ATA100/133 - SATA150/300 ?

Not sure but it is 4 years old I would guess ATA100/133 it is 7200RPM which at the time sounded good.LOL It is SATA.

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Official Abuser of Boinc Buttons...
And no good credit hound!

It will work fine in your machine.

A faster hard disk will help on disk intensive tasks, it can make the system a little faster to boot, lets games sawp between levels faster, and reduces the slowdown effect of having to access the page file when doing large tasks. All good things of course.

But the effect on SETI is pretty minimal as it does very little disk access.

One thing I did notice is that other porjects use more RAM, running 4 X Rosetta tasks in 1gb of ram will run you out of memory and start using the hard disk. Teh CPU utilisation dropped below 100% at times as the system waited for disk. A faster disk would help, although more RAM would be the obvious fix. But running 4 X SETI tasks there si still heap of free RAM.

Ian

I was wondering how much difference if any hard drive speed makes to seti? When I ran the benchmark test for Luke, my hard drive barely even had a bar in the comparisons and Windows 7 also says it is my slowest componant. What should I look for in a Hard drive as I don't need a huge one maybe I can get a good one if it matters.

Doing the CUDA tasks your drive will probably get more exercise then mine do, but I've set "Tasks checkpoint to disk at most every" to 900 seconds. I found this lower the temps of my drive a few degrees. I had messed around with longer times, but didn't find any noticeable gain. The saving data to disk every x number of seconds is really the only activity that goes on while processing a task. The downloading & uploading of task data is limited by the connection to the servers. Which is many times slower then any current hard disk(at least I hope so).

If you want the highest performance then you could grab some ramdisk software. I personally like Datarams free version.

For a desktop setting that checkpoint time to just short of the time for your drives to go to sleep will result in the best performance possible. However I doubt you could measure the difference in less than 10 continuos years of crunching and then it would be a change of 0.0001 in RAC.

Unless you are planning on editing hidef video don't worry about your hard drive speed.

You let your hard drives go to sleep? *gasps* heh

I think someone was saying something similar in a post asking if SSD's would help run S@H faster.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

The O/S caches the writes so the O/S writes when it has time otherwise it stays in memory until it can write..
Kind regards Vyper

And if your system locks up / crashes before the write to the HDD, then that data is lost.

So true indeed :)

//Vyper

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_________________________________________________________________________
Addicted to SETI crunching!
Founder of GPU Users Group

My computer was running CUDA on three GPU's and crunching on three of four CPU cores. The drive read/write indicator light was on almost constantly. Slow response time opening programs. It would freeze requiring a reboot several times a day. Very annoying to say the least.

I bought a new VelociRaptor that has a drive speed of 10,000 RPM and has a 16MB Cache. Supposedly the fastest non-Solid state hard drive made. Programs open super fast now. Boot time was cut almost in half and the system hasn't frozen up on me once. My windows experience base score (Vista) went from a 4.8 to the highest rating possible of 5.9. Everything is faster, even running virus scans.

So, to me the important question isn't, will SETI run faster with a faster hard drive. It's, does my computer run slower while running SETI, and it DOES run considerably slower. The faster hard drive is the way to go if your running SETI on multiple CPU's and GPU's cores at the same time.

I mean, if you can live with everything being slower and your computer doesn't crash every time you try to watch a short video on youtube or whatever, great. If it's your main computer, not just a cruncher and you need to do other things while crunching five or more tasks at the same time, a faster drive will make things much more bearable IMO.